99.95% High Purity Manganese, page-504

Its unclear which way this will unfold. One options would appear to be supplying additional evidence showing that while some similarity exists, the steps noted still meet the patent criteria. Only six months exist to do that and changing official's minds can be difficult. The other is of course the patent application is unsuccessful and any HP works are progressed without having a patent.

What would no patent mean?
Quite a bit of discussion on this point has occurred in the EGR threads because also they have a purification process patent and RNU's put in an objection to that patent. The result is still unclear. EGR's discussion threads indicate that you can still build processing/purification plants - as long as you don't breach patents that other people have. My quick reading of the objections indicated they related to the processes already being known, rather than someone else having a patent first. This would mean that E25 could use their process, as could anyone else that figured out the same or a very similar process. There is therefore an increased risk of competitors setting up purification plants with a similar or identical process. Given the difficulty of enforcing international patents in some countries, this risk already existed.

Having the process patented enables the possibility of licencing the process to others who are trying to get manganese to high purity. E25 wasn't discussing licencing so the reduced ability to licence removes one possible upside. If the NPV is half way correct, there's enough upside from E25 using its own ore and processing it to HP itself. The lack of a patent wouldn't appear to stop E25 executing this strategy.

On a different matter, I'd have expected someone to have found the next charter ship if it was going to arrive and depart in June.